As Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip rages on, ceasefires come and go. Most last just long enough for Palestinians to dig out the dead from beneath their collapsed houses, get the injured to overcrowded and under-resourced hospitals, and seek enough food and water to last through the next round of airstrikes.

“There is nothing left but stones,” Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer quoted an old woman saying as she searched desperately through the rubble of what had been her home.

A July 28 poll shows that 86.5 percent of Israelis oppose a ceasefire. Yet we continue to hear that Israelis want peace.

It’s true that at least some of them do. An Israeli protest in Tel Aviv brought 5,000 people into the street. That’s good – though a far cry from the 400,000 who poured into the streets to protest Israel’s invasion of Lebanon back in 1982.

And when a young Palestinian teenager was kidnapped and tortured to death – burned alive – in Jerusalem after the bodies of the three kidnapped young Israeli settlers were found, many Israelis tried to distance themselves from the horrific crime. “In our society, the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed.

But in fact, there is a place for those who call for murder – at the highest political and military levels of Israeli society.

Meet Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Knesset – Israel’s parliament. She belongs to Israel Home, a far-right party in Netanyahu’s governing coalition. She issued on Facebook what amounts to a call to commit genocide, by deliberately killing Palestinians, including women, children, and old people.

“The entire Palestinian people is the enemy,” Shaked posted. “In wars, the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”

The Knesset member went on to say that the mothers of Palestinians killed should follow their dead sons to Hell: “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

Her language reminds me of a chapter in our own history – the genocidal Indian Wars. U.S. military leaders had called on their troops to wipe out all the Native Americans. Col. John Chivington was asked on the eve of the Sand Creek Massacre about killing Cheyenne children. “Kill and scalp all, big and little – nits make lice,” he replied.

Shaked’s comments also echo the words of an Israeli colonel who testified under oath at the wrongful death trial of Rachel Corrie, a young U.S. peace activist killed by an Israeli soldier driving an armored bulldozer in Gaza. “In a war zone there are no civilians,” said the military officer – who was responsible for training Israeli soldiers to serve in the occupied territories.

There’s no question that Hamas’ primitive rockets violate international law. They can’t be accurately aimed at military targets. But that doesn’t justify Israel’s violation of its own obligations under international law as the occupying power in Gaza.

Israel has the region’s strongest military, the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Middle East, and the unconditional backing of the United States. Its assault on Gaza violates the Geneva Conventions. Israel is imposing collective punishment against all Gazans, attacking hospitals, and using disproportionate force.

Israeli officials know full well that the best way to protect their citizens is to implement a real ceasefire – a breakthrough that would require opening Gaza’s borders. Some of them also know the best way to keep their citizens safe long term is by ending the occupation altogether. Problem is, not enough of them will admit it.

The US has broken every International Law before and after 9/11, so what makes anyone think for a moment that Israel would obeyed, they're pals, buddies, till death do us part……

Prinzowhales

Stolen lands…murdered children…starvation…denial of even the most basic human rights…I'm glad the 'world' is so very comfortable with a 'truce'…The map of Palestine since the early 20th century shows the price that these people have paid for being in the way of 'western (Rothschild)' ambitions and schemes…chief among them being the colonization of Palestine by Ashke****s from Khazaria.

While Israel murders Palestinians, US-supported ISIS and al Qaeda murder Christians, Shi'a,Sunnis and others in Iraq and Syria. It is no accident that the regimes attacked by the War Street and the City's Murder, Inc. were secular, progressive and opposed by the insane Wahabi monarchists in Saudi Arabia.

"Order out of Chaos?" Ask Germans or Russians if World War I or II, was 'worth the price' in blood and misery…Ask a fat, stupid, self-important sack of crap like Madeleine Albright if the promotion of sanctions was worth the lives of tens of thousands of Arab children…and, YES! YES! YES!…a thousand times yes…this Jewess affirms the slaughter with the same elan as the rabbi who pronounced that thousands of Arab lives were not worth a Jewish fingernail…One helps shape American foreign policy, the other rouses the rabble of the Holy Land to fight and murder for their right to dominate and destroy lesser beings…

The same War Street interests that have destroyed the American economy, in their interests, the interests of 'free trade' lies…who support the mythos of debt-as-money…continue to shape American foreign policy…even to the point of fomenting a new world war. They have violated the understandings that ended the last one on every significant point and are busy through their media beating the drums of war against Russia.

Cancel your cable, cancel your media subscriptions…end any and all support to the Lying Media Machine that in/de-forms the hearts and minds of the world. Spit on War Street's lies…have only contempt for the talking heads and empty suits who manage the 'news' on OUR airwaves…I will never knowingly purchase anything from Israel…"Never Again!"

Israel has built its apartheid wall in concrete and hate…Fine! Leave it behind its wall. Bolivia and other states, poor as the are, have the courage to stand for human rights and freedom. The FREE WORLD–Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa–are leaving War Street and Zionism, their usurers, mass murderers and their American meat puppet consumers in the dust bin of history, for God is no longer on our side and we are no longer on His…'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you…'–a simple enough commandment, but…the capacity to obey it… escapes those creatures elected by both Christians and humanists alike…it escapes all of the 'best and brightest' who pull volumes of international law out of their hindquarters at prestigious universities and foundations and international organizations dedicated to the promulgation of twaddle and waste…

Enjoy the truce…help the Palestinians…to hell with Israel and the Congress that loves it…Lil' Ran and the rest of the 'useless eaters' on the Potomac…and those who elect them…stinking savages…the very incarnation of 'banality and evil…'

bozhidar balkas

palestinians are at least morally obligated to defend their people also by rockets and to use them to kill ?all colonials on their land in palestina if they refuse to go back where they came from.

palestinians did not write int'l laws; which, in fact, destroyed a would-be state of palestina or as a part of syira or jordan and which are killing, expelling, torturing, belittling, etc., them for a century now.

btw, int'l laws have been in flames for at least one century in much of the near east and not just now in gaza.

Ron Harwell

When a war is declared on an enemy, the first thing that occurs is the enemy is made less than a human being. This has occurred with the US (and I am sure all other countries that has declared war on some country/race). We did it with the Germans, Japanese, Germans (again), Koreans, Vietnamese, South and Central Americans, Caribbeans, Mexicans, Arabs (all of them)…We have slang names for all races not White, not like us, etc.: It makes us better, exceptional. Not only does the mindset that embraces the gun and war as a means to an end, that thinking must change. Shaked is no better than any Nazi who ran one of the extermination camps. This is right out of their playbook for Aryan conquest and one race only, everyone else was vermin. Her vision of a world is not one I care to live in and I am sure most of those living on this planet would agree. That thinking is insane and psychopathic.

Alan MacDonald

Ron, your comments, whether intended to or not, lead me to consider the inverse of the so-called 'Washington consensus' (which is the same as the 'Israel consensus' or more generally the 'Disguised Global EMPIRE consensus').

It does not surprise me that the more blunt, blatant, and disgustingly visible aspects of historical superior Imperialist/colonial EMPIRE slaughter of 'the other' — noted in the article by Bennis of 19th century American unapologetic 'Indian-killer' Col. Chivington, and the uniquely open and unapologetic 21st century mention of justifiable 'genocide' that was quickly deleted from the media/propaganda sector of the Israeli arm of the DGE's media sector — disclose the maw of the now merely 'partially' Disguised Global EMPIRE, which enforces the Disguised Global Empire consensus that has captured, controls, and now fully "Occupies" both our former (and supposedly democratic) countries; the US, and Israel.

It is not surprising that the mask and camouflage of Empire has slipped and revealed the DGE wanton killing in Israel more than in the US (although the US is the nominal HQ of this Global Empire) since Israel's role is as the violent 'boarder fort' rather than the HQ of the DGE.

On a positive note, the South and Central American countries, that have been able to successfully recognize, expose, confront, and humanitarianly move past Empire (as well as several formerly Imperialistic advanced societies) with the quiet transition to a 'Socialist-democracy consensus' — as Prinzofwhales mentions of the BRICS (and implies of some EU countries) — hopefully indicates the beginning of the necessary 21st century 'Great Turning' that will be required to overcome the DGE if we are to survive as a species.

Over 500 human right abuses by Israeli government is filed with UN for last 30 years' which means that Israel never have and is not going to respect the international laws. When such barbaric regime bombs UN schools one after another killing innocent children while they know that there are children's, mothers and fathers seeking refuge because they have nowhere els to go, it means that Israel is at war with the world and world have to respond by boycotting Israel, that's the only language that Israeli fascism regime will ever understand.

Caesar_Saladin

I would pay more attention to the Israelis killing civilians in Gaza, but gosh darn it, can't you see we've got a… a…. that's right…. we've got an EBOLA outbreak on the way in the US. Let's talk about that instead and get the Gaza thing out of the news for a few days, shall we?

I was wondering what calamity would jerk the American public's attention away for a minute- but I never suspected they'd trot out the Ebola story again.